I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
The Eternal Sloptember
I’m calling it now, the adoption of AI agents into software development will be one of the most costly mistakes in the field’s history. Agents cannot program, and it’s taking longer and longer to realize that they can’t. They are a highly sophisticated statistical model designed to mimic the distribution of programming. The output is broken, but in a way that’s getting harder and harder to detect. Which is exactly what you’d expect from an increasingly accurate statistical model.
Why I'm Betting Against AI Agents in 2025 (Despite Building Them)
I've built 12+ AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations. Here's why the current hype around autonomous agents is mathematically impossible and what actually works in production.
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
Why Software Engineering Is Indispensable in the Age of Coding Agents
Can AI make Software Engineering (SE) -- the discipline -- obsolete? And can it make software engineers -- the professionals -- redundant? This paper argues that the rise of capable AI coding...
Agentic Engineering Management
To what extent AI is OK to use in software development might be debated, but in general, the idea is not a controversial one anymore. The debate rather moved on from code completion and simple PR summarizations to Agentic Engineering, where an execution loop allows an AI Agent to function
The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine
My current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they're given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed.
Introduction to Agents
Discover what actually works in AI. Join millions of builders, researchers, and labs evaluating agents, models, and frontier technology through crowdsourced benchmarks, competitions, and hackathons.
10 things I learned from burning myself out with AI coding agents
Opinion: As software power tools, AI agents may make people busier than ever before.
AI Agents Will Become the New UI, and Apps Take a Backseat
For decades, screens, keyboards, and structured applications have shaped our relationship with technology. People learned how to interact with computers
Agent Skills
AI coding agents take the shortest path to done, which usually means skipping the specs, tests, and reviews that make software reliable at scale. Agent Skill...
Most Improbable Agent of You
It is commonly said that AI today is the worst it will ever be.
How Do AI Coding Agents Contribute to Software Development? an Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests
Recent advances in large language models and their rapid adoption across software engineering tasks have made Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agents an integral component of modern software development workflows. While developers increasingly benefit from these coding agents, their impact on software quality remains insufficiently understood. In particular, how agentic contributions evolve across the software development lifecycle has not been thoroughly investigated. This study aims to characterize agentic pull requests (PR) in comparison to human generated PRs and to examine how their properties change across different stages of the development lifecycle. Using the AIDev dataset, we first analyze how differences in merge rates between agentic and human generated PRs vary over time. We then identify the types of development tasks where AI coding agents are predominantly applied and investigate how these task distributions evolve across development quarters. Finally, we compare a set of key characteristics of agentic and human generated PRs, focusing on their implications for software quality and their temporal dynamics. Overall, our findings provide an empirical and longitudinal perspective on the role of AI coding agents in software development, offering a more nuanced understanding of their benefits and limitations in real-world practices.
How Do AI Coding Agents Contribute to Software Development? an Empirical Study of Agentic Pull Requests
Recent advances in large language models and their rapid adoption across software engineering tasks have made Artificial Intelligence (AI) coding agents an integral component of modern software development workflows. While developers increasingly benefit from these coding agents, their impact on software quality remains insufficiently understood. In particular, how agentic contributions evolve across the software development lifecycle has not been thoroughly investigated. This study aims to characterize agentic pull requests (PR) in comparison to human generated PRs and to examine how their properties change across different stages of the development lifecycle. Using the AIDev dataset, we first analyze how differences in merge rates between agentic and human generated PRs vary over time. We then identify the types of development tasks where AI coding agents are predominantly applied and investigate how these task distributions evolve across development quarters. Finally, we compare a set of key characteristics of agentic and human generated PRs, focusing on their implications for software quality and their temporal dynamics. Overall, our findings provide an empirical and longitudinal perspective on the role of AI coding agents in software development, offering a more nuanced understanding of their benefits and limitations in real-world practices.
How to harness AI
"Coding agents" are complicated but intelligible
Being Realistic About AI Agents in 2025 - Perilous Tech
There are few predictions I can make with more certainty than that we’ll hear the word “agent” so many times in 2025 that we’ll never watch another spy movie
Agentic AI gets lost
On the failure of AI to develop world models
